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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A-Z Challenge: B is for Brontosaurus

By: William G. Muir

When
I was a child there was nothing that caught my imagination like dinosaurs. Why wouldn't they have? It wasn't like you could look
out your window and see dinosaurs walking down the street.
Neither did you have one as a pet. Unless you had a bird as a pet.. Dinosaurs were
mysterious and literally larger than life.

Back
then my two favorite dinosaurs were the Tyrannosaurus
Rex and the Brontosaurus. To my elementary school mind these were
the grandest of all the dinosaurs, the two biggest titans. The T. Rex
is easily one of the most popular of all the dinosaurs. It was the
King
of All Dinosaurs, its
name means tyrant lizard. How badass is that?

While
T. Rex was the meanest of all the dinosaurs, the
Brontosaurus was the kind, gently giant of the prehistoric world.
Instead of chasing down the other dinosaurs and eating their flesh to
survive, like the T. Rex did. The Bronosaurus spent it's day eating
leaves from the tree tops. That was how they were depicted in the
story books and movies I saw back then.

But
something happened as I grew older. Something that would take nearly
twenty years for me to come to grips with and accept. The Brontosaurus
lost its name, being replaced with Apatosaurus.
We went from Brontosaurus meaning thunder
lizard, to
Apatosaurus meaning deceptive
lizard.
I am not sure about you, but to me thunder
lizard
is much cooler than deceptive
lizard.

Why
the change? How come the beloved brontosaurus was having its name
changed? What exactly was going on here? The short answer is that the
Brontosaurus never existed. It is a far more detailed and technical
story than this short article could do justice to. But I will say this,
the Apatosaurus was the first name given to this species. But the
skeleton that was found was smaller than the one that would be named
Brontosaurus. It turned out by 1903 it was already known that
both skeletons belonged to the same species, one was just older than
the other.

Oh
yeah there is also something to do with missing skull and somebody substituting the skull of another dinosaur in its place.

While
no other dinosaur lost
their names, other changes have taken place with the dinosaurs since
I was a little kid. We now know that birds evolve from
the dinosaurs,. There are some that think dinosaurs might
have been warm-blooded instead of cold-blooded creatures. We now have
evidence that raptor dinosaurs had feathers.

What
killed off the dinosaurs has also changed during my lifetime. It was
thought when I was younger that a series of volcanic eruption drove
the dinosaurs into extinction. But now the accepted theory is that
that a large object falling from space (either an asteroid or comet)
hit the Earth wiping out most the life forms on the planet. Now it seems that this theory has its challengers and
theory that combines both natural events on the Earth and an object
falling from space is being discussed. We will see if there is any
evidence to back up such claims.

I
have to say the biggest change to the dinosaurs thought was to their
appearance. It is no longer

thought that the dinosaurs tails dragged
along the ground as they walked. What is now believed is that they
held their tails up in the air. The evidence for this is that no tail
tracks have been found with foot prints. So gone is our bulky
dinosaurs with their head held high in the sky and their tails
resting on the ground. Instead we have a much sleeker stream-lined
creature who's head and tail are set level.

I
much prefer the old design. Those sauropods had a friendlier quality to
them. This newer look have lost that.

So
B is for Brontosaurus, but for me it means something else. It means
accepting change. We live in a world that is ever changing, ever
evolving. If I can come to accept, albeit it took quite some time to
do so, the changing of the name of my favorite dinosaur or Pluto
being demoted from the ranks of planets then I can accept other
changes as well.